Barton Kunstler - Beyond the Illusion of Human Rights

Universal Rights

The idea that natural, innately held universal human rights are the basis for
human dignity and justice is so deeply flawed that the idea of rights may be
obsolete as a means of resolving social disputes, regulating human behavior, or
achieving the ends of social justice that rights were originally conceived to
fulfill. To use rights as a reference frame for attempts to overcome oppression
or extend justice overburdens a concept that does not have sufficient intrinsic
authority to achieve these ends, and restricts our ability to draw upon
alternative solutions to timeless problems.

The future is a screen upon
which we project our hopes for liberation from the terrors of the past. The
notion of human rights has, for the past two centuries, fulfilled this very same
role: America as the longed for destination of the downtrodden; the promise of
freedom, elections, democracy in every country throughout the world; the dream
of liberation have replaced paradise and hyssop as balms for the human spirit.
Rights seem palpable: they can be guaranteed, we can almost taste them. Rights,
whether we hold them or only hope to one day possess them, guarantee our future.
Rights, however, are as elusive as the future, and perhaps illusive as well. As
social and ecological crises intensify, we must free ourselves of the delusion
of rights before we can free ourselves of the delusions of the future.

In an attempt to do so, we shall examine the notion of rights and the
alternative system from which it emerged, and finally offer an alternative
suitable to the present age.

The belief in universal human rights as it
crystallized in the 18th century is the central engine of modern legal, moral,
and relational frameworks. It undergirds the social contract between citizen and
society, and governs the parameters of legal protection and political
participation. It profoundly affects our values. Outrage at poverty and
oppression, the hopes of the oppressed, our belief that to expect justice in the
world is rational, all rest on a deeply felt sense that all human beings have
the right to live free of threats to body and property, and to participate fully
in the social process. Psychologically, we tend to feel valued in a society that
protects us and allows us full latitude of expression, while our self-worth
suffers under a regime that sanctions our abuse or forbids us behavior allowed
to others. The extent to which we are endowed with rights matches the degree to
which society views us as human, while the extent to which we are deprived of
rights defines the level of dehumanization to which we are subject.

Thus, violation of rights is not just an assault on a specific option (free
speech or the right to vote), but strikes at the very identity and thus
stability of self and society. If, as Paolo Freire states, citing Hegel, that
"what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of
the master", then deprivation of rights is clearly a profoundly psychological as
well as political act. Any society that allows or encourages the violation of
rights is already, whether it recognizes it or not, in a state of violent
disintegration. A society that does not actively maintain and extend the
umbrella of rights, finds its freedoms eroded and itself liable to corruption
and decay.

The identity, laws, and values of the United States, in
particular, are founded upon the idea of natural, inalienable rights. Yet,
despite an intensified concern for human rights today and many successful human
rights initiatives, the idea of rights has been degraded as rights are
increasingly used to advance an endless set of agendas. Some of these agendas
are indeed just, but using rights as the focal point of discourse burdens the
idea with a weight it never was meant to bear.

Today, intellectual
property rights are extended to portions of the genetic code used in
bioengineered products. The right to bear arms is taken to include the right to
use protective vest-piercing teflon bullets. The conflict between the right to
choose an abortion versus the right to life of the foetus marks a major social
divide. Creationists claim the right to have their beliefs taught as the equal
of scientific theories. Mining and timber interests claim that U.S. laws
regulating their activities undermine their rights as distinct cultures (i.e.,
the "mining culture") . Accused rapists' lawyers, to protect their clients'
rights, can examine a victim's psychological records, and in court twist the
most personal revelations of fantasy life or the most painful life episodes into
an alleged flaw in the victim that somehow prompted the attack. Advertisers of
myriad products proclaim everyone's right to be stylish in their own way, while
real estate developers may sue environmentalist opponents for depriving them of
earning a living. At the same time, crime and violence convince entire
societies that members' basic rights to life and property are more insecure
than ever.

The notion of rights simply has no relevance to many of these
positions, and is inadequate to help contending groups resolve their
disagreements. The idea of rights is so misplaced and diluted in the contexts in
which it is being used, that once a claim is put forth as a right, discussion
becomes futile, for "rights" is simply the wrong frame for the argument.

Circle of Familiars

Rights in archaic societies (or those that
retain their archaic legacies) differ from our own, in that they have no notion
of rights apart from that bestowed by full participation in community life. The
collective is primary. As A.W.H. Adkins states of ancient Greece, before the
city state era, "human beings ha[d] no rights qua human beings". Protection and
participation derived from a person's position within a group whose members had
mutual interests, a relationship denoted by the term philotes, "a circle of
people with cooperative relationships".

In fact, human beings are
creatures of society from before the very beginning, as can be observed in the
behavior of primates, wolves, elephants, and other social mammals. Ethologists
such as Frans de Waal have observed animal characteristics formerly thought to
be solely human: intense competition for hierarchy and status; behaviors that
precisely express and reinforce an individual's place within the group;
supportive, nurturing, and protective behavior other than parent/child
relationships; interwoven alliances with apparent emotional bonds; communication
of feelings of pleasure, displeasure, and belonging; ritualistic behaviors
incorporating violence, dance, sexuality, and intoxication; and so on. One can
hardly refrain from recognizing here aspects of individualized behavior, whether
we choose to call it proto-human or not.

Always, however, among social
animals, group life is primary. The differentiation of social roles that defines
individuality is largely adaptive, aimed at regulating violent tendencies and
sexual competition, and enhancing the efficiencies of survival. As Dudley Young
shows, another element asserts itself: an irrational, intoxicating, celebratory
aspect of character enacted by chimps, for example, in their evening drumming,
their response to thunderstorms (Young 120 ff.), or the eating of the brain of
the colobus monkeys that they hunt (Young, 66). Ritual, feelings of sympathy,
hierarchy, intoxication, violence, identity: even in animal bands, the rudiments
are there. Group behavior already arises out of the structure of social roles.
Thus, both roles and the behavior that defines them establish the extent to
which the group protects individuals and allows them to participate in its
activities. In short, even among animals, we can discern a primeval version of
rights. a primeval version of rights. The individuality of an animal can be
described with reference to its position vis `a vis the "rights" accorded it by
the group.

Thus, by the time humans emerged as a species, we had a long
history of performing the behaviors that define selfhood and the self's place in
a group. In many such behaviors - dance, cannibalism, signals of submissions and
dominance - we see the early makings of human ritual, but it is not yet ritual.
Rather, an act becomes sacred and ritualized because through that act we express
the essence of individuality. The very act that distinguishes one from the
collective - or, conversely, that allows the collective to experience the power
and synergy of its own unity, itself as one - becomes at once both a sign
advertising its own identity and a monument to that identity, thus permantizing
it (neatly expressed by the dual meanings of the ancient Greek word sema, "sign"
and "burial mound"). Establishing such a sign binds both psychological and
social energies, and forms the core cathexis from which identity develops. Thus
myth and identity are self-reflexive: they arise when consciousness turns back
on itself to wonder at its own birth and its meaning; with this, comes the
longing to secure the eternality of the identity that is embodied by the
narrative content and structure of the myth.

Rights, then, have an
inherent sacred aspect because they emerge in the same breath, so to speak, as
selfhood and identity. Identity is carved out of the collective mentality to the
extent that individuals have rights. Yet neither rights nor identity are ever
secure, for both exist by a kind of metaphysical sleight-of-hand. On the one
hand, rights represent the foundation of one's role and belonging in the group.
But one's role is always subject to challenge, hence, rights are negotiated with
every bristle of a cohort's fur, with every physical threat. Because rights come
into being as a consequence of the emergence of an individual self, and because
they depend on the same act of self-conscious awareness that secures the self,
every negotiation of rights is also a negotiation upon which the continued
integrity of the self depends. Rights must uphold the integrity of self, but
rights have no essential existence apart from the self that rights must uphold.
As notions of self are elaborated, the idea of rights develops as well. This
leads to a certain contradiction at the heart of the whole enterprise: rights
are the "greenhouse" that nurture the development of individual self and
identity. Meanwhile, rights themselves only make sense as projections of
individuality.

The evolution of animal behavior towards human legal and
political forms is evidenced in rituals of apportioning food that have been
observed among many mammals. While female lions kill the prey, male lions get
first go at it, devouring the delicacies and choice cuts. Wolves take turns at
the feast according to status. Similarly, apportionment of slabs of meat among
human hunters, or booty among warriors, is an early means of defining social
status and rights (Kunstler, 1991). Among warrior societies, cannibalism and
ingestion of psychotropic plants were marked by ritualized carving or division
of the victim or plant, from which the sacred role of the steward in ancient
societies derives, and Louis Gernet (1968, 1981) and Gregory Nagy (1979) have
demonstrated the link between the distribution of the sacrifice and proto-legal
ideas of justice.

Farther along, in ancient Greece, the foundation of
new city states was formalized by apportioning land among the new citizens, and
sharing food at the common table was an early guarantor, and symbol of,
citizenship in the polis (Kunstler, 1991, Vernant, 1982), a precise parallel to
the more primitive division of booty among warriors. Indeed, the Iliad begins
with a conflict over one such division of booty, a conflict that inspires the
"wrath" of Achilles, the first word and thematic note of the epic. In Homer,
too, a formulaic phrase denotes the equal division of meat at the heroes' feast
(Iliad 1.468, 1.602, 2.431, 7.320, 23.56). One hears echoes far more ancient
than Homer in such passages.

In many myths, the bodies or substance of
deities are divided and shared by celebrants, an act that often bestows identity
upon a community and is linked with its discovery of a food source, i.e., a herd
or agricultural crop. The inverse of such acts is the sacrifice or offering, in
which the god receives portions of the slaughtered beast or the first fruits.
Actually, all such acts of division and ingestion are close in meaning: the
division of meat at the feast, the apportionment of land at the initiation of a
colony, and the rewarding of rights are, in fact, the division of the god
itself. Eating the gods distributes their power throughout the social body and
binds the community of sharers. Land, food, rights - these are all emanations of
the magical substance of the deity whose division establishes a social compact
and a compact with the natural sources of fertility.

Societies tend to
become more stratified as wealth increases, and rituals grounded in ancient
usage yield to formally defined legal relationships that precisely describe the
claims of individuals to the materia of society. The more complex the society
and the more wealth involved, the more painstaking the legal categories. Greek
law evolves as the clan's claims to the deceased's property yields to the legal
claims of an individual's linear descendants (Willets, 1967). The legal
accounting of estates in anticipation of inheritance led to a more precise
definition of rights and prerogatives in political society even as it was fueled
by - and favored -the emergence of individual claimants over the groups that
formerly stood as heirs.

At the city-state level, citizenship comes to
replace the idea of philotes as the organizing principle of the larger
community, but it is also exclusive and does not erase the strong feelings of
membership in the philotes circle. One possesses rights only as a function of
social responsibility, of one's contribution to the well-being of the community,
and one's identity derives strictly from the polis and one's family. In most
Greek poleis, only citizens able to afford the hoplite armor required to fight
and protect the city and its citizens, had full participative rights. In the
more democratic cities, rights under law were broadest. No one, however, would
claim rights within their community by reference to innate, inalienable human
rights: such a concept was meaningless to a philotes-oriented culture. The magic
circle of socially bonded individuals is the basis for defining rights; abstract
notions of innate human rights do not exist.

The shadow side of the
circle of familiars is the fact that those outside the circle are nothing to
those within it; they may be totally objectified. The horrors of genocide, the
atrocities of torture prevalent in over 100 nations today, or the murderous
ethnic cleansing witnessed in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo are grounded in the
tensions between loyalty to the closed circle of familiars and the aggression
endemic to human nature, whether one views this aggression as based in the
animal or the social self. But even in times of peace, elaborate ceremonies of
gift-giving are required to elevate one's status from outsider (i.e., nothing),
to insider or ally. Greek myth offers countless examples of such bonds
established between members of different circles, which came under the xenos
code of behavior. xenos refers to the stranger, the stranger's host (if one
exists), and the code that binds them. When one travels beyond one's circle of
philotes, one becomes xenos, a person with no rights except those defended by
physical prowess. A native of another community, however, can extend to the
xenos the status of guest and draw him into a local protective circle of
philotes. The process also served to join two circles of familiars, and was the
basis of marriage arrangements between phratries. The code muted aggression and
mistrust and allowed closed groups to establish alliances with one another. It
also modeled how rights were bestowed in all philotes-based groups: via
ceremonial exchange of vows and gifts.

Cult of the Object

Greek city states defined rights via laws covering criminal acts, due legal
process, inheritance, and distinct levels of political participation based on
property. As commerce expanded, limited rights were extended to metics, members
of other communities who lived and conducted their business abroad. Thus, in a
complex mercantile environment, the primitive xenos code became the basis for
laws that defined the protections, obligations, and behavioral latitude of
strangers living among the natives. Rome, of course, bestowed citizen rights to
all qualified members of its vast empire, a way of extending the social
obligation and responsibility that bound the empire together. The integrity of
community, not individual, was still paramount.

The rights belonging to
members of any given group ebb and flow with the economic and political power of
that group and its ability to compel compliance to its vision. In general,
rights travel from the more propertied classes on down, each new claimant group
inspired by the (often unwitting) example of previous ones. As medieval Europe
developed politically, economically, and technologically, the bourgeoise claimed
its freedom from caste, nobility, church, and even guild. The growth of urban
society, fueled by mercantile activity, created the social and psychic space for
an expanded notion of individuality to flourish, a trend evident in the arts.
During the Renaissance, as John Berger (1973, 1981) notes, the lush qualities of
oil painting reflected the desire of the nouveaux riches to celebrate their own
substance, perhaps substance itself.

"Oil painting did to appearances
what capital did to social relations. It turned everything into an object.
Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity" (Berger,
87). In such paintings, the rich textures of clothing and drapes, the reflection
and sparkle on the polished surface of fine furniture, the candy-like quality of
the jewels, all reveal that however religious a painting's subject, the true
subject was corporeal. The oil painters of the Renaissance celebrated the self
as substance. They also celebrated the creation of a universe of perception,
value, and values residing in the realm of art and object that was an
alternative to the religious world view of the Middle Ages. The opening of
pictorial space, evident in painting in a steady progression from the 13th
century throughout the Renaissance (and, arguably, up to the present day),
represents both the opening of the internal self to its own possibilities for
growth outside the boundaries of birth and belief.

The aestheticized
object is beautiful not just because of the craft or art that goes into its
creation, but because it is an extension of a newly conceived concept of self,
an extension of the myth that self composes about both itself and the myth of
itself (i.e., that the myth is sacred, true, etc.). The modern object, that is,
the object from the Renaissance on, is important precisely because it is not
sacred, in the traditional sense. The realm of the sacred is highly efficient in
its use of objects: it does not need many to function as symbols. Royalty, for
example, has its crown, throne, sceptre, and insignia. Yet, this selection of
objects to receive the charge of symbolic meaning has generally occurred in a
world relatively poor in human-made objects. (Contrast this refinement of
symbology with more archaic notions of the sacred, such as those that hold every
tree or animal to partake of holiness). Whatever the relative wealth of a king
in, say, 1250 A.D., it was as nothing compared to the wealth unleashed by
capitalism from its early stages on. The modern object, liberated from the
constraints of the archaic economy, goes forth and multiplies. The deity of the
modern age mirrors, structurally, the logic of economic forces and the machinery
that serves them. The god of this new system, like all gods, is carved up and
its substance distributed throughout the world, in this case into every object
of beauty or wealth upon which an individual might stamp her or his ownership.

The proliferation of objects and the ballooning spatial framework
available to increasing numbers of people created the ability to distinguish
oneself from others, and the choices subsequent to this ability. The self was
refined and cultivated by exposure to the wondrous new dimensions of the
objective. The cult of possession was inevitably turned on the self: one's self,
or the true self of another (as in love), becomes one's most treasured
possession, and begins to displace God as the object of civilization's devotion.
As the self becomes exalted, so too must the notion of rights that protect the
self and that guarantee its ability to experience all the marvelous
possibilities the brave new world offers. Out of this came a sentimentality of
self that encouraged the development of romantic love and, eventually, the
Rousseauvian view of Nature and childhood.

The revolution of rights in
18th century Europe and America is unthinkable without this long cultural
preparation. Such thinkers as Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Locke advanced the
idea of universal rights that attach to human beings by virtue of their being
human. Thomas Jefferson, the contradictions of his personal life and exclusivity
aside, majestically evoked this belief in paragraph two of the Declaration of
Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain inalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed". It is noteworthy that Jefferson, in his own
draft, referred to the "self-evident truths" as "sacred and undeniable". As
Edwin S. Gaustad writes, they "required no argumentation, no Aristotelian
syllogism, no Platonic presupposition, no authority whatever except Reason to
establish their validity."

That all "Men", by virtue of their creation
and in line with the intent and will of the Creator, possess rights, reverses
the most ancient sense of rights, and overthrows the general insulated tendency
of the philotes system in favor of an all-inclusive, universal formula. One no
longer has rights by virtue of belonging to a circle of philotes. Rather,
community or state must be reshaped to conform with the individual's possession,
as individual, of divinely ordained rights. Rights are no longer carefully
apportioned by formal ritual, law, or traditional usage. They are now
distributed throughout the entire world and attach to one at birth. To the
Enlightenment minds that disdained the irrationalities of religion, the
automatic dispensation of rights did away with any need for rites. And of
course, if rights are automatically bestowed at birth, so too is identity, a
notion that fit well with Rousseau's vision, and even Locke's tabula rasa, since
an infant's mind begins growing at least from its earliest training.

Thus, beyond the tensions inherent in any notion of rights are added others:
rights no longer need to be earned, nor do they incur obligations equal to the
status they confer upon a person. The job now is to protect one's rights (one's
intrinsic wealth), rather than to earn them. And the idea that one exchanges
rights contractually in order to strengthen social bonds has today become
anathema to many; individual rights are no longer seen as part of any exchange
mechanism, including gift exchange. Rights are viewed as so essential and innate
they become indivisible; hence, they inspire a strong tendency towards isolation
and lend support to arguments that societies comprise discrete entities and have
no innate unifying force.

The extensive claim to rights that culminated
in the Enlightenment is inseparable from the cult of the object that developed
hand-in-hand with the market economy. Rights are viewed as possessions precisely
because they evolved in harness with the cult of the object and the principle of
possession. Rights become the ultimate commodity even as they are enshrined as
our most valuable possession. Their possession represents the gateway to
possibilities as vast as the manufacturing and market system of the burgeoning
Industrial Revolution and as broad as the scope of economic and psychological
terrains pursued by colonizers across the globe. As Harold J. Laski points out:
"By 1600, men are living and working in a new moral world, what permeates them
[its sources] all is the sense of a new wealth at hand for the seeking. The
passion for novelty is intense." (Laski, p. 64). Laski points out that the new
doctrine of non-governmental interference with business and trade "assume(s)
that economic liberty is in the nature of things," "Freedom" is just another
word for the chance to pursue prosperity unfettered, and the traditional
Christian deity is driven back from his governance of social and economic
affairs into the realm of "private faith" (Laski, 100-101). Locke (Laski, 101)
articulated the ethic that "The supreme power cannot take from any man any part
of his property without his own consent." In other words, the new god is the god
of property and it both drives the old god back into his cave and assumes the
mantle of "national salvation" (Laski, 100) as its own.

The
revolutionaries of America and France took the next inevitable step: if a
government is not created in harmony with the demands of individual rights, then
citizens can seek redress to the point of overthrowing it. Individual rights
have been given precedence over community cohesion and the need to uphold
community obligations, although to the 18th century mind, responsibility to the
community was a given. Nonetheless, the shift in perspective is crucial to the
future degradation of the idea of rights.

With the concept of natural,
or inalienable rights, a new pattern is set forth, radically visionary because
it asks everyone to see in everyone else the potential for full actualization.
The new ethic undermined traditional forms of oppression, and certainly inspired
the fight against slavery and, eventually, the struggle for the liberation of
women, colonized populations, and "minorities". All our attitudes have been
profoundly shaped by this ethic, and it has inspired countless people in the
daily struggle for freedom and dignity.

Despite its triumphs, the
principle of universal rights can also be viewed as a sentimental conceit
verging on deceit, sentimental because it feeds on what we suppose it demands we
feel rather than what we truly do feel. For our emotions cannot sustain the
demands of a belief in all people as ends in themselves, especially in a
globalized era in which the entire suffering population of the world is nightly
marched into our living rooms via television. Our minds dutifully regard each
new round of suffering as an outrage, but our feelings recoil or turn off. We
know we must feel for the literally billions of people whose rights are being
trampled, but we have nothing but the term "rights" to guide us in our feelings
or response. No wonder the term has become meaningless. We watch sentimentalized
movies of Gandhi or elevate Mother Theresa to the role of global saint because
we must believe it possible to universalize compassion, and for some few, it may
have been possible. But the gravitational pull of the philotes circle, indeed,
of the multiple circles that claim us, is far too great and our core feelings
cannot go where our minds might lead.

Triumph of the Object

The
relationship of person to object is primary to economy and to law. In the market
economy, a person "owns" an object, whether the object is money, a house, a
slave, a radio, or a tin of sardines. "To own" means to absorb a thing into the
sphere of psycho-social space that an individual has managed to claim as his or
her own. People considered wealthy and powerful command greater regions of
socially acknowledged identity than the poor and dispossessed. To take a
possession from another is to pierce the boundaries of ownership, and law exists
in large part to sustain the illusion of "own-ship", i.e.,
self-through-ownership. The corollary is that the law exists to protect the
notion of ownership so that the most powerful are granted legitimacy in their
pursuit of greater ownership.

It has long been acknowledged in social
formulae that the transference of ownership is intrinsically dangerous to the
self. Rituals of exchange guarantee safety during the awkward liminal moment
when goods are passed across boundaries. Any exchange can easily erupt into
violence unless the most formal protocols are observed. Today's economy is no
less free of threats: one might be "ripped off", "devoured by sharks", "beaten
up" at meetings, and worse.

Because ownership bestows de facto rights as
well as rights by law, and one's social wealth quite palpably determines one's
access to rights, the relationship of an individual to the objects and structure
of exchange strongly influence the character of rights in society. The market
economy has achieved its pinnacle in this era of corporate capitalism:
everything is an object, everything bought and sold, including air rights, the
flow of electrons and information throughout the world, water rights, land
rights, mineral rights, fishing rights, timber rights, the right to pollute, and
the right to market parts of the genetic code or medicines derived from specific
bodily parts. All that was once holy is now for sale and "human rights" converge
with the notion of "rights to" the very substance of the world itself.

The self, too, as we noted, is marketed as the ultimate product behind the
pitch for most products: advertising sings the hymn of the Self-Adoring Self.
But this is logical, considering that the identification of ownership with self
has permeated every aspect of our relationship to objects.

This is true
as well of objects in the grammatical sense: the "I", the modern Self, stands as
Subject over a vast kingdom of objects. At its moment of greatest power, of
greatest ownership, the Self is actually at its most delusionary and fragile, at
its vanishing point. Why? Because it is distributed throughout all its objects.
The Subject is the apportioned God distributed among its objects, only the
Subject actually worships itself through its objects. Eventually, it is divided
into and invested in so many objects that it becomes fully objectified. The
Subject that wanted so many things disappears piece by piece into the inanimate
objects of its desire.

Relations between Subjects are mediated through
complex negotiations whose function is to regulate the transmission of self
masquerading as ownership. Hence, connective bonds among people and groups
becomes less and less important to the regulation of exchange. Abstract legal
formulations come to define the algebra of contending claims typically advanced
by discrete "selves-as-Subjects". Along with the wealth of objects there is also
a wealth of objectified qualities such as freedom, right, beauty, etc. In an
ironic twist, once the object has absorbed the sacredness of Self, the self
becomes mere container, and the object appropriates the substance of the
apportioned god. The object-world, in which the Self is wholly invested, becomes
a new God, supplanting the Subject. The Self, fixed upon the object, loses its
connection not only to deity, but to its own narcissism, and has been severed
from the moorings that bound it to its own identity.

The Gift

In mythopoeic consciousness, the boundary between subject and object, and
between a person and things, tends to be blurry. The two are often strongly
identified with one another, an identification based on the mutual
identification and obligation that charge through them. The reverence with which
hand-crafted objects were handled; the sacred investiture of symbolic clothing,
weapons, musical instruments, and jewelry; the numberless myths and fairy tales
regarding birth tokens; the sacred shields and headdresses of warriors; the
powerful taboos around food, blood, flesh, and hair; the magical regard in which
early technical achievements were held: the list is endless. Person and object
were traditionally united by a strongly felt mutual identification and ongoing
exchange - even circulation - of identity which bestowed a sacred identity upon
each object. (This sacredness is not due to the role of the object as symbol; it
is sacred in itself due to its sharing the numina of identity with the
individual or community).

This identity of self and object reflects the
mutual identification between individual and community. The immense energy
inherent in the organically forged bonds of the animal band was a tremenduum
capable of extinguishing any individual who did not respect its power. Early
notions of individuality were linked with ideas of apportionment and division:
the deity is divided and eaten so that its pieces may be individualized. In
effect the primal deity is both superego and id. The necessities and
catastrophes governing organic life, and submission to the tremenduum, give form
to the superego, while the rhythmic pulse of natural life asserts itself as id.
In sharing a portion of the god with one's fellows, one gains a measure of
individual sovereignty (by identifying it as oneself) over the tremenduum
represented by the collective's energy. This sovereignty contains the seed of
individual awareness and integrity, the ego. Any occasion in which boundaries
are crossed - birth, death, puberty, marriage, conflict, friendship, travel,
shamanic journey, exchange of objects - not only connects the partners in the
crossing, but actually opens up the passageways to that powerful swarm of energy
out of which both community and self have been scribed.

The gift economy
belongs to archaic cultures for whom objects and, more importantly, the
circulation of objects, activates the energy of the tremenduum. It derives its
framework from the impulses and behaviors of the philotes circle, but had been
left behind by many societies that still retained the philotes as the basis of
the social contract. The northwest American Indian custom of the potlach first
drew special attention to the notion of a gift economy. Marcel Mauss (1950,
1990) explained how sumptuous gifts offered by one tribal phratry to another
were "woven into an inextricable network of rites, of total legal and economic
services, of assignment to political ranks in the society of men, in the tribe,
and in the confederations of tribes, and even internationally" (Mauss, 6). He
remarked on the hostility and competition for prestige that accompanied the
potlach, and the fact that the potlach not only included giving away all a
phratry's wealth, but might involve mass destruction of goods as well.

In both highly formal and informal settings, the gift establishes a magical
or religious bond between giver and receiver in which the latter incurs an
obligation to give a gift in return, often one more "valuable" than the
original. As Dudley Young observes of the xenos code, which belongs to the gift
economy, "the offering of hospitality is no less than the bridge that enables
man to move from a warring world into one of politics and other peaceful
communications" (Young, 277). Anxiety underlies the gift, whether the seemingly
senseless destruction of goods in the potlach, or the offering that marks a
long-standing, affectionate alliance. Anxiety is alleviated by giving up what
one has become overly attached to - but this only works for a society that has a
clear sense of the alternative, the balanced state its sacrifice or gift seeks
to achieve.

Every act of giving transforms the character of human
interaction, shifts it from one laden with conflictual potential to one marked
by affection (philotes) and collaboration. Yet, as Mauss indicates, the
gift-giving transmits hostility as well. To offset this build-up of tension, the
gift must keep circulating, and it is the circulation of wealth from one person
to another, or among groups, that creates the web of relations and hence the
value of the objects. Accumulation, production, and ownership for their own sake
are not the objectives here. Indeed, to halt the circulation of gifts is to
interrupt the flow of life force upon which the well-being of the community
depends. Value intrinsic to the goods, anxiety over conflict, and resolution
through alliance are fused in a continual dance that, while by no means utopian,
offers an alternative to the systems of rights based on the philotes circle, on
the one hand, and innate, natural rights on the other.

Lewis Hyde (1979)
suggests that creative activity, both in regard to the internal dynamics of the
creator and the role of the artist in relation to her or his auditors, can only
be sustained by the dynamics of the gift economy: "...the commerce of art draws
each of its participants into a wider self. In the realized gifts of the gifted
we may taste that zoe-life which shall not perish even though each of us, and
each generation, shall perish" (Hyde, 152). Hyde's insight applies as well to
all gift-based economies: circulation of energy and wealth through gifts is
linked to notions of group cohesion and immortality. The gift economy lies at
the heart of the archaic community, and Hyde (88) notes the "struggle between
legal contract and what might be called 'contracts of the heart'" when gift and
market economies collide. Yet the gift and market economies stand in
evolutionary relation to one another as well. The obligation incurred by the
gift is identified by both Gernet and Mauss as a key feature in the early
history of law. Indeed, in early law, as Mauss (49) states, "things themselves
had a personality and an inherent power. Things are not the inert objects that
the law of Justinian and our own legal systems conceive them to be [In Roman
law] they form part of the family." Mauss (48 ff.) and Hyde (86) both indicate
that real law (regulating things) and personal law were not always discrete
categories, but often were identical due to the mutual identification between
law and object.

The role of the object in the gift economy stands as far
from the notion of commodity as an object of exchange or desire can be. The gift
economy's subject/object distinction is erased by the close identification of
gift with self. Because the gift perpetually moves between giver and recipient.
The indirect object (recipient) in one exchange becomes the subject (giver) in
the next. The gift, oddly enough, never actually serves as direct object because
it always belongs to the essential nature of both the giver (subject) and
recipient (indirect object). The dynamic tension of the scheme is inherent in
the imbalance of a grammar that possesses subject and indirect object, but no
direct object at all. And if the object is never direct object, and instead only
partakes of the nature of those who keep it in motion, then in a sense it is
simply not an object at all. This paradox further unsettles any pretense at the
social order being founded on a stable platform; it reveals the profound
instability at the heart of economic exchange and law by revealing the
syntactical absurdities at their core.

Gift-giving is also associated
with offerings to nature or the gods via sacrifice, pointing to another key
notion of the gift economy: the vacuum that one creates by giving inevitably
draws wealth back to oneself. This can only work when supported by a strong set
of obligations that accompany the offering. The gift creates an obligation,
which is the basis of contract law. The vacuum is creative, and out of it comes
the necessity of contract as the basis of economy and law. As long as the object
resists reification the system resists entropy; as the energy of the object is
spent - in both senses - it is more likely to be possessed, and with possession
comes weight, matter, gravity, and time.

The rights established by
exchange of gifts are conceived very differently from the innate rights we
receive in a commodity-based economy. In the gift economy, rights can never be
taken for granted and they come with strict obligations attached. Innate rights
are prior to a social connection because the object has extended its dominion
over consciousness, and the relationship of owner to object becomes the model
for all other relationships. Hence, we own rights just as we own the things to
which we have a right. As Paolo Freire (40) writes, "The earth, property,
production, the creations of people, people themselves, time - everything is
reduced to the status of objects at its ('the oppressor consciousness's')
disposal." In the struggle over rights - in a world where rights are objects -
those with most power over objects tend to win. And remembering that the
philotes model of rights co-existed with a commodity-based economy for millennia,
we can suggest that the closed philotes circle may well fall short of the
dynamism inherent in an active gift economy. The gift economy is potentially an
open, expansive system, and the role of the philotes in a gift economy, while
crucial, is subtly different from the closed, cautious, and conservative
philotes group that history shows us time and again. One area of investigation
may be the effect early commodity-based economies had upon the character of the
philotes.

Beyond Objects and Rights

The domain of the object
may be eroding. In our current electronic, post-modern, post-relativity era, the
object has become, as Gilles Deleuze (1993) notes, an "objectile", suitable to
an age "where fluctuation of the norm replaces the permanence of a law; where
the object assumes a place in a continuum by variation. The new status of the
object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold, but to a temporal
modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of
matter as a continuous development of form" (Deleuze, 19). This has an impact on
the notion of subject as well as object, for the subject becomes, in Whitehead's
term, a "super-ject", that is, a viewer defined by its possessing "the point of
view" necessary to see the objectile as it travels along its path (Deleuze,
19-20). This role ofobjectile is precisely that held by the object in the gift
economy. The subject in the gift economy, defined only in relation to his or her
gift, performed the role of super-ject.

Deleuze's conceptual play
reminds us that natural rights are at home in a Newtonian world of discrete
objects in a logical clockwork universe. Newton's world is spatial, with
well-defined relationships between subject and object, and object and object. In
the post-Newtonian world, objects have no fixed relationship to us, nor do we
have fixed relationships to anything beyond our point of view, beyond the
objectiles streaking across the screen-of-vision field. The notion is absurdist,
yet suited to a world of global networks, cyber-realities, virtual
organizations, non-goods-based economies, a universe of black holes and bent
space, programmed uncertainty, and a quantum-based physical ground in which
"nothingness" takes up the greater portion of the volume of the universe. As the
corporate economy becomes ever more voracious, even the political entities that
pretended to be guardians of our rights yield to conglomerates whose notion of
rights is non-existent or irrelevant. We are beyond an obsession with ownership
of objects, even beyond ownership of money. The goal now is to control the flow
of symbols representing currency; currency and currents have become one. Like
Deleuze's objectiles, we are streaking in a trajectory that arcs far beyond the
conditions in which the Enlightenment notion of rights were formed or could be
sustained.

The problem of expenditure of surplus energy, which Georges
Bataille (1991) calls "the accursed share", bears directly on the nature of the
gift. The gift, the sacrifice, and even frenzies of self-destruction can be seen
as adaptive mechanisms to regulate the build-up of surplus energy which presents
a tremendous, perhaps overwhelming, psycho-social challenge. The matrix defined
by rights and identity is the ultimate "accursed share", for it represents the
ultimate surplus of all: self-awareness, a setting apart of the individual from
the universal or collective.

In this era of voracious growth and
proliferation of capital, the dilemma of surplus becomes life-threatening. One
cannot produce without devouring, as contemporary ecocide attests. What Lorenz
(1950, 1987) calls "the pleasure experienced through increase" depends for its
sustenance, as Lorenz (139-140) points out, on the natural limits to organic
growth. In contrast to organic forms, "a human enterprise . . . is potentially
immortal; not only is no limit set to its growth, it is in fact that much less
subject to disruption the larger it becomes" (Lorenz, 140). When the "accursed
share" becomes the sole objective of the market system and its institutions, the
goal, in fact, of each individual, a vital limit has been breached. It is
precisely at this point that the self loses itself in the infinitude of
"objective" reality.

And while self-hood becomes our most precious
commodity, as a commodity it is constantly being devoured. Even now, the value
of our identities to marketers, information brokers, insurance companies, and
biogenetic researchers, is increasing. But this is only the market economy's
reflection of a more essential process. Natural rights presume an infinite self.
Bataille's "accursed share" is now the greater part of production; our economy
exists to produce and feed an infinite self, a self of infinite possibilities
whose value is sustained by the notion of irreducible, hence infinite, rights.
It is a triumph over death, of sorts, and when death ends, so does life, for no
new forms can come into being. The surplus overflows all natural bounds as well
as our ability to dispose of it. Our efforts become more frantic, and our
systems move towards overload.

Rights, like Lewis Hyde's notion of
creativity, require some measure of a gift economy; they are the most profound
of gifts, so primeval as to pre-date the human. They are coeval with the gift of
identity and individuality, the gift offered in rites of passage, which are
marked by the bestowal of keepsake gifts by the initiators. And just as the
movement of the gift is identified with the movement of life energy throughout
society, the circulation of the gift of rights strengthens both their legitimacy
and the resilience and power of the self. Such power invites energy into its
system, and the invitation is accepted because it is a more efficient,
attractive, and satisfying system to belong to: political power achieved on that
basis will have enduring effects.

Such a view offers escape from the
aridity of rights activism that views rights almost as palpable objects that
have somehow been taken from their deserving owners. This activism cannot be
abandoned, of course; it is responsible for saving too many lives. But its
victories will be defensive and local because it is a concept no longer adequate
to the challenge of deep systemic change, as it was in the 18th and 19th
centuries and in the anti-colonial movements of the mid-20th century. In a
sense, the notion of human rights is still resting on these laurels. If the
contemporary object is objectile, and often unrecognized as such, then our
presumptions of our relationship to wealth, property, and objects are becoming
largely delusional, and our notions of rights increasingly irrelevant.

Freire's work seems especially powerful in this regard, because turns the
self back on itself and offers the self the chance to negate the assumptions
about itself that it holds most dear. The pedagogy of the oppressed is a gift in
which the pedagog gives up power but not due to abnegation of, or embarrassment
over, ownership, but as part of a rigorous process in which a great obligation
is incurred by the receiver of this power, the obligation of self-liberation,
perhaps self-creation. It is essentialist and connective in the archaic sense of
the philotes circle and the gift economy, but existential and contemporary in
that it fixes the drama of self squarely on self-reflexive processes whose
purpose is renewal and reassertion of connection.

Conclusion

We are in the latter stages of a world system that no longer respects the
sources of its own wealth, including the wealth represented by rights. Our
economy can only devour, as if its own hollowness can only be filled by every
resource the earth has collected for literally billions of years. The problem of
rights is intrinsically linked to this, the essential problem of our time. The
degree to which formulations derived from a gift economy can help resolve this
dilemma depends upon our ability to acknowledge that everyone is gifted, at
least in the possession of life and consciousness. That this has been
interpreted as legitimizing the notion of inalienable, natural rights should not
dissuade us from the basic idea that we receive a gift of some sort at birth.
Cosmology, if nothing else, speaks to the miraculous odds against life and
consciousness appearing at all, and whether or not one believes in miracles,
there ought to be no objection to the premise of a gift. But as we have seen,
once received, the gift must be given again and again in order for it to
multiply. Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed is one way our verbal and gestural
languages can be transformed according to the logic of the gift economy. Our
challenge in liberating the future from the graven templates of the past lies in
establishing models whose logic reflects the counter-intuitive logic of
giftedness.

The gift, however, is always fraught with danger: the danger
of exchange, highly charged numinosity, deception, passion, hostility, and even
connection. Any new notion of rights will have to be ecological as well as
liberationist. It will integrate the shadow side of human nature in its fullest
sense, as it was recognized in myth, and not simply as a function of difficult
or oppressive economic and political conditions. Somehow, the recognition that
self is illusory and that thus rights are illusory, must be met in a way that
sustains both self and rights. The gift economy points the way in this, for in
it neither rights nor self can become fixed. The illusion of self is sustained
by continual giving and renunciation followed by the celebratory, festival
spirit of renewal.

Paradoxically, both self and rights perhaps become
ultimate objectiles, objects of our attention that define the conditions of our
attention. In some way, our task is to confront our brutality as a species and
our inability to cope with the accursed share, the part of ourself that is both
blessed and that has committed extraordinary crimes to achieve its state of
blessedness. Can we do this in a way that fosters connection among individuals
and between individuals and things, while giving us the navigational skills to
survive in a highly technologized, capitalized world?

Naturally, one may
shy away from - or flat out avoid - suggesting programs to achieve this end. I
would suggest, however, that we begin to consider our own roles as agents of
change and supporters of rights in light of the contradictions embedded in our
very peculiar and dangerous world moment. In any such consideration, the notion
of rights must be primary, but how we grasp the idea, how we objectify it, will
determine whether we continue down a path of delusion or achieve a useful and
sustaining approach to social change.

8. Hyde, Lewis (1979, 1983). The Gift:
Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, Vintage
Books.

9. Kunstler, Barton (1991). "The Werewolf Figure and its Adoption
into the Greek Political Vocabulary", in Classical World. Duquesne University,
Pittsburgh: Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc.

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A former Director of the General Education program in Lesley University's School of Management, Barton Kunstler is now an active public intellectual, in the fields of communications coaching, futurism, creativity and education. Dr. Kunstler is the author of The Hothouse Effect, which explores the secrets behind history's most creative communities.

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